Roger Grunwald

Roger Grunwald is an American playwright and screenwriter whose work dramatizes lives tested by war, displacement, and the struggle to reclaim identity. He is the playwright of I Died in Auschwitz, an acclaimed solo stage drama that premiered in San Francisco in 2017 and was revived in a widely praised 2018 San Francisco production. In January 2027, the play will be produced by Marin Shakespeare Company as a springboard for a national tour currently in development. Grunwald has adapted and reimagined the play as a feature-length screenplay, expanding its central storyline and characters into a multi-timeline narrative set in Nazi-era Europe and postwar America. He is also the creator of The Mitzvah Project, a performance-based Holocaust education program built around his short play The Mitzvah, which introduced the central characters later expanded in I Died in Auschwitz. The program has reached more than 30,000 students in 28 U.S. states, Canada, the U.K., and Israel. Grunwald is based in San Francisco.